The National Association of Realtors (NAR), which pushed Congress to give FHA yet more responsibilities, is now trying to show that the agency is not really insolvent. But the slippery "facts" they are using show how tenuous their argument is.

Proposals to increase the conforming loan limit are really proposals to take more of these benefits away from the people who actually need the help and give it to people who do not.

Few recognize just how troubled this government agency really is. When measured against the accounting system used by private mortgage insurers, the FHA is deeply insolvent, with a capital shortfall of tens of billions of dollars. If it were a private firm, state regulators would immediately shut it down. 

Although the Schumer-Lee plan deserves credit for seeking to promote international capital flows and labor mobility, it would neither make a measurable dent in the housing sector's backlog nor fix a broken immigration system that hampers our economy's long-run prospects.

No serious observer of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) believes its financial future is bright. But few recognize just how troubled this government agency really is.

For any housing finance reform plan to be credible, it must do much more than wind down the GSEs. Because of the Dodd-Frank Act a number of formidable legal obstacles now exist that must be cleared away before a private securitization market will come back. If the administration is serious, its plan must address all these issues.

Banks trying to prevent Wal-Mart from entering their businessshould tell us a lot about what the separation of banking and commerce is really about.

Low mortgage underwriting standards were partially responsible for the collapse of the housing market. Now that standards have been raised to prevent another collapse, there are calls to bring them back down again.